1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of enabling a user to interact with content received from a remote server. The content is displayed on a mobile telephone. Typical forms of content include feeds from sites such as news or entertainment sites and also advertisement content.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is becoming increasingly common to show advertisements on a mobile telephone. The typical approach, exemplified by the AdMob™ service, is for a publisher of a mobile web site (e.g. a WAP site) to add some lines of AdMob code to their web site. An advertiser then creates an advert, sends that advert to a central AdMob server and then bids on that server to have it included on selected mobile web sites. The server analyses bids and sends adverts that have the highest bids to the appropriate mobile web sites, so that those adverts are displayed on mobile telephones when users view those web sites with a browser. When a user clicks on an advert on a mobile web site, the advertiser pays both AdMob and the owner of the mobile web site. Advertising systems such as this have an important role to play because they (i) can encourage people to create new mobile web sites and (ii) enable mobile users to locate products and services of interest.
One limitation of this typical approach is that it works only with mobile web sites (e.g. WAP sites)—i.e. sites that are seen and interacted with using a browser application running on the mobile telephone. Although browsers are commonplace, the experience of interacting with mobile web sites using a browser can be poor. Also, adverts may not be relevant to an end-user and hence may be irritating. Conversely, if adverts that are genuinely useful to end-users could be displayed on a mobile telephone at the right time, then it is likely that click-through rates would be relatively high, given the closer relationship many users have with their mobile telephones, compared with their desktop PCs. But there has been no mechanism for achieving this.
Further, mobile telephones and PDAs are becoming increasingly powerful and able to run multiple local applications (e.g. Java applications) very quickly; these make WAP sites appear very cumbersome. But to date, there has been no viable and effective way of displaying advertising on these local applications.
Another feature of the conventional WAP based model advertising model (i.e. where a WAP browser on a mobile telephone displays an advertisement) is that the user is generally given just one way of interacting with the advertisement, namely to click on a WAP page to select another WAP page. Limited possibilities of interaction are common in mobile telephones, largely because their small screen size makes them very different from desktop PCs: with a desktop PC, the screen is large enough to enable complex menu systems to be displayed, often with multiple icons open at any one time, each selectable to open an application or initiate some function. But small screen devices like mobile telephones, none of that is possible; interaction is hence very much more constrained and lessons learned in the PC domain rarely translate fully into the different world of the small screen mobile telephone.